The role of cinematic techniques in understanding character affect
Filmmakers must rely on cinematic devices of perspective (close-ups and point-of-view shot sequencing) to emphasize facial expressions associated with affective states. This study explored the extent to which differences in the use of these devices across two films that have the same content lead to differences in the understanding of the affective states of characters. Participants viewed one of two versions of the films and made affective judgments about how characters felt about one another with respect to saddness and anger. The extent to which the auditory and visual contexts were present when making the judgments was varied across four experiments. The results of the study showed judgments about sadness differed across the two films, but only when the entire context (sound and visual input) were present. The results are discussed in the context of the role of facial expressions and context in inferring basic emotions.
Article outline
- Overview of the current study
- Study 1: Content analysis of the films
- Experiment 2: Auditory and visual stimuli
- Method
- Participants
- Materials
- Design and analysis
- Procedure
- Results and discussion
- Experiment 2: Visual stimuli only
- Method
- Participants
- Materials
- Design and analyses
- Procedure
- Results and discussion
- Experiment 3: Auditory stimuli only
- Methods
- Participants
- Materials
- Design and analysis
- Procedure
- Results and discussion
- Experiment 4: Auditory and visual stimuli (open-ended responses)
- Method
- Participants
- Materials
- Design and analysis
- Procedure
- Protocol scoring
- Results and discussion
- General discussion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
References (56)
References
Baggett, P. (1979). Structurally equivalent stories in movie and text and the effect of the medium on recall. Journal of Verbal Learning & Verbal Behavior, 18(3), 333–356.
Batson, C. D., Early, S., & Salvarani, G. (1997). Perspective taking: Imagining how another feels versus imagining how you would feel. Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin, 231, 751–751.
Booth, W. C. (1961). The rhetoric of fiction. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.
Bordwell, D. (1985). Narration in the fiction film. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Bordwell, D., & Thompson, K. (2016). Film art: An introduction. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
Boyd, R. L., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2015). Did Shakespeare write double falsehood? Identifying an individual’s mental world with text analysis. Psychological Science.
Buck, R. (1984). The communication of emotion. New York, NY: Guilford Press.
Buhrmester, M., Kwang, T., & Gosling, S. D. (2011). Amazon’s Mechanical Turk: A new source of inexpensive, yet high quality, data? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(1), 3–5.
Carroll, J. M., & Russell, J. A. (1996). Do facial expressions signal specific emotions? Judging emotion from the face in context. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 701, 2015–218.
Carroll, J. M., & Russell, J. A. (1997). Facial expressions in Hollywood’s Portrayal of Emotions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 721, 164–176.
Coburn, C. E., Penuel, W. R., & Geil, K. E. (2013). Research-practice partnerships: A strategy for leveraging research for educational improvement in school districts. Retrieved from [URL]
Cutting, J. E. (1987). Rigidity in cinema seen from the front row, side aisle. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 13(3), 323–334.
Cutting, J. E., Brunick, K. L., & Candan, A. (2012). Perceiving event dynamics and parsing Hollywood films. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 38(6), 1476–1490.
Cutting, J., & Iricinschi, C. (2015). Re-presentations of space in Hollywood movies: An event-indexing analysis. Cognitive Science, 391, 434–434.
de Vega, M., & Leon, I., & Diaz, J. M. (1996). The representation of changing emotions in reading comprehension. Cognition and Emotion, 101, 303–321.
Ekman, P. (1992). An argument for basic emotions. Cognition and Emotion, 61, 169–200.
Ekman, P., Friesen, W. W., & Ellsworth, P. (1982). What are the relative contributions of facial behavior and contextual information to the judgment of emotion? In P. Ekman (Ed.), Emotions in the human face (2nd ed, pp. 111–127). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Fletcher, C. R., & Bloom, C. P. (1988). Causal reasoning in the comprehension of simple narrative texts. Journal of Memory and Language, 271, 235–244.
Gernsbacher, M. A., Hallada, B. M., & Robertson, R. R. W. (1998). How automatically do readers infer fictional characters’ emotional states? Scientific Studies of Reading, 2(3), 271–300.
Gerrig, R. J. (1993). Experiencing narrative worlds: On the psychological activities of reading. New Haven, CT: Yale.
Gerrig, R. J., & Jacovina, M. E. (2009). Reader participation in the experience of narrative. In B. Ross (Ed.), The psychology of learning and motivation (Vol. 511, pp. 223–254). New York, NY: Elsevier.
Graesser, A. C., Bowers, C., Olde, B., & Pomeroy, V. (1999). Who said what? Source memory for narrator and character agents in literary short stories. Journal of Educational Psychology, 91(2), 284–300.
Hickenlooper, G. (Director) & Hell, K. (Executive Producer). (1994). Some folks call it a sling blade [Motion Picture]. USA: Vanguard Cinema.
Kintsch, W. (1988). The role of knowledge in discourse comprehension: A construction-integration model. Psychological Review, 95(2), 163–182.
Komeda, H., & Kusumi, T. (2006). The effect of protagonist’s emotional shift on situation model construction. Memory & Cognition, 34(7), 1548–1556.
Larsen, J. T., McGraw, A. P., & Caccioppo, J. T. (2001). Can people feel happy and sad at the same time? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 811, 684–696.
Long, D., & Golding, J. (1993). Superordinate goal inferences: Are they automatically generated during comprehension? Discourse Processes, 161, 55–74.
Magliano, J. P., Dijkstra, K., & Zwaan, R. A. (1996). Predictive inferences in movies. Discourse Processes, 221, 199–224.
Magliano, J. P., Miller, J., & Zwaan, R. A. (2001). Indexing space and time in film understanding. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 15(5), 533–545.
Magliano, J. P., Taylor, H. A., & Kim, H. J. (2005). When goals collide: Monitoring the goals of multiple characters. Memory & Cognition, 33(8), 1357–1367.
Magliano, J. P., & Zacks, J. M. (2011). The impact of continuity editing in narrative film on event segmentation. Cognitive Science, 351, 1489–1489.
Miall, D. S. (1989). Beyond the schema given: Affective comprehension of literary narratives. Cognition & Emotion, 31, 55–78.
Mobbs, D., Weiskopf, N., Lau, H. C., Featherstone, E., Dolan, R. J., & Frith, C. D. (2006). The Kuleshov effect: The influence of contextual framing on emotional attributions. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 11, 95–95.
Myers, J. L., & O’Brien, E. J. (1998). Accessing the discourse representation during reading. Discourse Processes, 261, 131–157.
Özyürek, A., & Trabasso, T. (1997). Evaluation during the understanding of narratives. Discourse Processes, 231, 305–335.
Pennebaker, J. W., Booth, R. J., Boyd, R. L., & Francis, M. E. (2015). Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count: LIWC 2015. [URL]
Pennebaker, J. W., & Seagal, J. D. (1999). Forming a story. The health benefits of narrative. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 551, 1243–1254.
Prince, S., & Hensley, W. E. (1992). The Kuleshove effect: Recreating the classic experiment. Cinema Journal, 311, 59–75.
Pudovkin, V. I. (1929/1970). Film technique and film acting. New York, NY: Grove.
Pudovkin, V. I. (1974). Naturshchik vmesto aktera. Sobranie Sochinenii, 11, 184.
Rabinowitz, P. (1987). Before reading: Narrative conventions and the politics of interpretation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Reichle, E. D., Pollatsek, A., Fisher, D. L., Rayner, K. (1998). Toward a model of eye movement control in reading. Psychological Review. 1051, 125–57.
Russell, J. A., & Carroll, J. M. (1999). On the bipolarity of positive and negative emotions. Psychological Bulletin, 1251, 3–30.
Suh, S., & Trabasso, T. (1993). Inferences during reading: Converging evidence from discourse analysis, talk-aloud protocols and recognition priming. Journal of Memory & Language, 321, 279–300.
Tan, E. S. (1996). Emotion and the structure of narrative film: Film as an emotion machine. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Thornton, B. B. (Director). & Meistrich, L. (Executive Producer). (1996). Sling blade [Motion Picture]. USA: Miramax.
Tompkins, S. S. (1962). Affect, imagery, consciousness (Vol. 1). New York, NY: Springer.
Tomkins, S. S., & McCarter, R. (1964). What and where are the primary affects: Some evidence for a theory. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 181, 119–158.
Trabasso, T., van den Broek, P., & Suh, S., (1989). Logical necessity and transitivity of causal relations in stories. Discourse Processes, 121, 1–25.
Tversky, B., & Hard, B. M. (2009). Embodied and disembodied cognition: Spatial perspective-taking. Cognition, 1101, 124–124.
Wallbott, H. (1988). In and out of context: Influences of facial expression and context information on emotion attributions. British Journal of Social Psychology, 271, 327–369.
Zacks, J. M., Speer, N. K., & Reynolds, J. R. (2009). Segmentation in reading and film comprehension. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 138(2), 307–327.
Zillmann, D. (1995). Mechanisms of emotional involvement with drama. Poetics, 231, 33–51.
Zillmann, D., & Cantor, J. R. (1977). Affective responses to the emotions of the protagonist. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 13(2), 155–165.
Zwickel, J. (2009). Agency attribution and visuospatial perspective taking. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 16(6), 1089–1093.
Cited by (3)
Cited by three other publications
Öncel, Püren, Shu Hu, Heather Ness-Maddox, Laura K. Allen & Joseph P. Magliano
2024.
Exploring the affordances of text and picture stories.
Discourse Processes 61:4-5
► pp. 203 ff.
Hutson, John P., Joseph P. Magliano, Tim J. Smith & Lester C. Loschky
2021.
“This Ticking Noise in My Head”.
Projections 15:1
► pp. 1 ff.
Mumper, Micah L. & Richard J. Gerrig
2021.
The Representation of Emotion Inferences.
Discourse Processes 58:8
► pp. 681 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 november 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.